Tuesday, April 03, 2012

TWD—Baking With Julia—Pizza Rustica

Pizza Rustica—sounds like pizza, but is more like a quiche or savory pie. We made that this go-round for Tuesdays With Dorie--Baking With Julia. It is fun to be making these recipes in Baking With Julia now. I like that we go from simple Irish soda bread to something more involved like Rugelach or this Pizza Rustica.

I like the pie. Even though I used a low fat ricotta, I know that this “pizza” is not really low fat, so I’ve tried not to eat too much of it. My only problem with it was the crust. It was quite a wet dough, did not specify any chilling time and I could not get it to roll out without sticking like crazy to my well-floured surface. I persevered and ended up pressing the bottom crust in to the pie plate. Since the top crust wasn’t going to cooperate with being rolling out and cut into lattice strips, I cut it into fun circles and placed them over the top of the pie. The little circles were much easier to work with getting off the counter.

I was happy that I even decided while buying ricotta to get some prosciutto instead of just using ham or bacon like I was going to and it was really good. The only change I made to the whole recipe was that I used low fat ricotta instead of whole milk.

I think this would be good with a different crust, like just a regular pie crust. Not sure what my problem was with this one, but I followed the recipe exactly. Maybe the original recipe came from someone who measures flour with a heavy hand. I weighed mine. Either way, this is a great pizza pie for a brunch or even breakfast or lunch, whatever, you could have it for dinner, too.

Your dots instead of a lattice are a great change :) your pie crust might have been due to the amount of humidity in the air, and it looks really wet actually - might have needed a bit more flour. even if you weigh your flour, your eggs might not have been quite as heavy as they should be - large eggs when baking are the best but they are even only on average 2 oz. also switching from full fat dairy products to low fat introduces more liquid to a recipe than will work for it. hope that helps! :) your pizza does look great and I wish I had used bacon and ham instead of prosciutto. :(